


The Things We Do For Love

by Schwoozie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Non-Explicit Sex, One Shot, POV Clarke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 01:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3551267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He calls her that. That name. The one that makes her spit, makes her shout, makes her bloody nails want to rend the walls.</p><p>Princess.</p><p>Like there's any fairytale that would take her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Things We Do For Love

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah. So this happened.
> 
> Title inspired by [this amazing gifset](http://octavviablake.tumblr.com/post/111965592689/i-want-people-to-tell-their-children-terrifying).

The first time he called her princess, Clarke wanted to rip every smarmy hair out of his head, weave them into a rope, and strangle him with it.

For a while it doesn’t feel much better. She doesn’t get why he refuses to  _understand_ , why they  _all_  refuse to understand—she doesn’t think she’s better than them, she doesn’t think she has a right to lead—but she knows what they have to do to survive, and  _damn that boy_  for making it impossible. Every time she turns right, he goes left, just to spite her, spitting that name in her face all the while.

Princess.

Like an airhead, like a whore, like a little girl playing with dollies while acid falls from the skies. 

Out of everything on this goddamned ground, Bellamy Blake is the one thing she’ll never know how to handle.

* * *

It changes. The world is different now, run through with blood; blood she spilled, blood she let spill, blood she tried to staunch but failed all the same. She wakes with dreams of her hair turned to fireants, bright red and burning as they devour her scalp, scurry into her eyes and flow from her mouth. She dreams of standing in the midst of TonDC as the missile hits; stands unharmed as women and men she was supposed to lead crumble into ashes. Sees her father’s face, Wells’ face, Charlotte’s and Finn’s and Anya’s stretched like burnt wax over their bones, frozen in a rictus of pain that the radiation could not completely scour. She stands in the middle of level five and feels someone’s hand upon her shoulder. 

She tells herself it’s her mother’s. She knows it isn’t. Her mother still has trouble looking at her, let alone touching her. Clarke has trouble herself. Turns away from the mirror as she washes her hands, closes her eyes when she leans into the sink to splash her face. Pretends she doesn’t see him in the doorway, watching her. Always watchful; tender, almost, the way his hand rests on her shoulder.

“Hey princess. Ready to go home?”

He says home like there’s a place like that; a place where people don’t exist who she’s left to burn. She’d burn him too, she knows, if it came to the choice. She’s burned him twice already; it’s him who’s evaded the flames.

She doesn’t look at the mirror as she turns to go. He might notice. He might not. She does notice, though, the way he sticks by her side the long walk home (eight hours, Emerson; make it in six); the way he keeps one eye on her, one on Octavia, and somehow one more on everyone in their retinue. He’s grown taller, she feels, in the time on his own; taller, and yet somehow more weighted; like he’s seen things human beings are not meant to see. Like he knows what she feels when Jasper looks at her like he wants to rip her throat out; like he knows the hands she feels clawing at her sleeves, dragging her down towards the ground. 

 _Together_ , he’d said. Together. There was a time that could have been; it’s ended now. She’s changed too much. They’ve both changed, but her most of all. She can’t be a child anymore. She was his princess. She might be still. 

But they didn’t need a princess. Not to survive.

They needed a nightmare.

* * *

He visits her, sometimes, and she’s always surprised. Wants to ask how he finds her when she’s always on the move, scraping for food and walking the woods and avoiding still pools of water. She supposes Octavia might have taught him a thing or two. She hopes they have time for that, now; to regain the days they were apart, the years before that when they were separated as living and unliving, the boy with his sister in the floor.

He tells her how things are at camp. Rolls his eyes at Raven and Wick, grins when she rolls her own at her mother and Kane. Smiles to himself when he talks about Octavia, about Lincoln, how they love each other. 

There is so much love, she feels, when she looks at him—full and boundless and exceeding his size, spilling out his pores and sliding across his skin. 

She thinks about love. The childish tuft she felt for Finn, what she named as such. For her father, a bone deep ache with the weight of stones. What Lexa holds for her people, ferocious, a beast, keen and jagged and biting even when she holds her jaws closed. She tries to love all of them, in her way. She tries.

And Clarke. What of what she feels for Clarke? Is there room enough for love in those ruins?

She looks at Bellamy and thinks about love and realizes he hasn’t spoken in a long time. That she’s been sitting there, looking at him, seeing the love he sends into the world, and he’s let her look like it’s something he is not ashamed to show. Like whatever weakness that love holds has been shored up tight, cordoned off for the time it might be useful—might be grand, in that fairytale way, to let into the light. Like maybe he does not see it falling flake-like from his fingers as he puts his hand over hers where it rests on her knee. Maybe he doesn’t even know it’s there. Maybe he’s never needed to know, because she’s been there to tell him when he’s lacked it.

He’s saying something again but she isn’t listening because she remembers how she felt when he first called her princess: like a stone beneath his boot, like she was nothing. She is still nothing; the difference is she knows it.

The difference is he doesn’t.

He doesn’t seem surprised when she leans forward to kiss him; doesn’t seem surprised when she drags off his pants and pulls him on top of her, opening her legs and pulling him in without a word. He doesn’t say anything as he fucks into her; not as hard as she wants and not as soft as he wants, but he makes it work. He spills onto the ground next to her and collapses on her stomach, breathing deep and even, like he’s used to this kind of thing.

She remembers his chest, in those days gone by, framed by feminine curves lithe and fair. Remembers how he’d smirked at the princess, pure and mighty and too chaste for him; too icy in her cloud-high throne to be considered even a whisper of her sex. She wonders about the things that have changed. She wonders about the things that haven’t. She wonders what becomes of his love, after it’s gone.

They still don’t speak as they right their clothes, mix his cum into the dirt. She feels his eyes on her as she readies her pack; counts in her head the days it will be till her needs are dire, when she might lower herself to scrounging. 

She pretends he isn’t looking at her but he is, and as if he were a mirror she does not spare a glance; she packs her things and stands and walks into the woods as if he were just another stone.

“Be seeing you, princess.”

It chokes her throat that he’s never stopped.

* * *

When she thought about her return, if she thought about it at all, it would be of him. Standing at the gates with Octavia, maybe, like he was the first time she put her arms around him. Maybe just waiting, because he felt her coming.

She sights the gates and he isn’t there. She enters the camp and he isn’t there. She’s pulled into embraces sweet and many and none of them are his. She doesn’t ask, because she knows how things go in this world. She knows how easy it is to go to the ground.

She doesn’t ask, but her mother seems to know; it’s the first thing she says when they are alone. Murphy came back, she says; told them about a city beyond the ocean, beyond imagining, a city of things that used to be. Told them the things Jaha told him, about what he had seen, the one more of the dangers this Earth holds. Raven didn’t believe him, and Kane felt the same; but Bellamy looked in Murphy’s eyes and said he would follow. Follow beyond the desert, beyond the ocean, out to a land whose ground has not accepted his cum into the dirt. And so he went, alone, him and Murphy, to rescue their mad captain.

Clarke doesn’t ask but her mother answers anyway. Yes he brought guns, he brought ammo, he brought food for weeks and gadgets Raven taught him how to use. Says that if old mad Jaha could brave the desert and emerge unburned, Bellamy could do it without even a singe. Clarke just nods, and turns, almost catches herself on the mirror in the corner; says to her mother without looking that she is tired and wants to sleep and she does not cry that night nor the next.

On the next after that, Octavia is the first to see him beyond the gates. As she was on the ground, she is the first to hold him in her arms again. He keeps his eyes shut at first, caught up in the relief that is his sister; but when they open they find Clarke’s and she realizes they have never let her go.

They don’t talk, then; there are plans to make, councils to decide, Jaha’s raving to interpret and question. Clarke takes part in all of it, but Bellamy leans away, like he’s done all the leading he can for the day, is glad to be once more in her shadow.

He doesn’t come to her this time. She goes to him. She feels she owes it to do this right.

They talk long into the night, long enough that the sun is just peaking beyond the mountains when she leaves him. They don’t mention that day in the dirt, but Clarke knows he’s remembering it; knows he has already forgiven her, as he forgave all else.

Forgiveness and love and the shadows between—those the things that make Bellamy Blake.

It’s so easy, the two of them, that Clarke forgets sometimes that when the world made love it aimed for her and missed; that all that Bellamy holds is not enough to fill inside her what she’d never had to lose. But it’s ok. They’re ok. They’re a miracle on the battlefront and a unit at home, and when the first skychild is born on Earth, theirs are the legends she will grow up singing.

Even Octavia, stoic as she’s become, finds it hilarious when Clarke emerges from Bellamy’s tent sleep rumpled and soft and still denies she touches her brother. It becomes a joke among the skypeople and grounders alike; they ask when they’ll have new princesses running around, when the king will find an heir for the throne. There are times when she almost loses her temper—it’s more than that, don’t you see,  _don’t you see_ ; this man makes it possible for her to survive, makes her _want_ to survive, turns her right when she goes left. He is a mountain, a megalith, a mirror she can finally look into. He speaks that name with a look in his eye like he wishes he’d meant it this way all along. 

It is more than that, the two of them. But in the end it is that too. Because apparently they _are_  just that predictable. 


End file.
